Broglie

Louis Victor Pierre Raymond duc de

Broglie

Born: 15 Aug 1892 in Dieppe, France

Died: 19 March 1987 in Paris, France

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Louis de Broglie's father was Victor, Duc de Broglie, and his mother was Pauline d'Armaill. Louis
studied at the Lyce Janson de Sailly in Paris completing his secondary school education in 1909. At this
stage he did not envisage a career in science, but was interested in taking literary studies at university. He
entered the Sorbonne in Paris taking a course in history, intending to make for himself a career in the
diplomatic service. At the age of 18 he graduated with an arts degree but he was already becoming
interested in mathematics and physics. After being assigned a research topic in history he chose, after
worrying greatly about the decision, to study for a degree in theoretical physics.

In 1913 de Broglie was awarded his Licence s Sciences but before his career had progressed much
further World War I broke out. During the War de Broglie served in the army. He was attached to the
wireless telegraphy section for the whole of the war and served in the station at the Eiffel Tower. During
these war years all his space time was spent thinking about technical problems. He explained how he was
attracted to mathematical physics after the War (see for example [9]):-

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When in 1920 I resumed my studies ... what attracted me ... to theoretical physics was ...
the mystery in which the structure of matter and of radiation was becoming more and more
enveloped as the strange concept of the quantum, introduced by Planck in 1900 in his
researches into black-body radiation, daily penetrated further into the whole of physics.

Taking up research in mathematical physics, de Broglie nevertheless maintained an interest in

experimental physics. His brother Maurice de Broglie was at that time carrying out experimental work on
X-rays and this proved a considerable interest to de Broglie during the first few years of the 1920s during
which he worked for his doctorate. De Broglie's doctoral thesis Recherches sur la thorie des quanta
(Researches on the quantum theory) of 1924 put forward this theory of electron waves, based on the
work of Einstein and Planck. It proposed the theory for which he is best known, namely the particle-
wave duality theory that matter has the properties of both particles and waves.

In a lecture de Broglie gave on the occasion when he received the Nobel Prize in 1929 he explained the
background to the ideas contained in his doctoral thesis (see for example [9]):-

Thirty years ago, physics was divided into two camps: ... the physics of matter, based on
the concepts of particles and atoms which were supposed to obey the laws of classical
Newtonian mechanics, and the physics of radiation, based on the idea of wave propagation
in a hypothetical continuous medium, the luminous and electromagnetic ether. But these
two systems of physics could not remain detached from each other: they had to be united
by the formulation of a theory of exchanges of energy between matter and radiation. ... In
the attempt to bring the two systems of physics together, conclusions were in fact reached
which were neither correct nor even admissible when applied to the energy equilibrium
between matter and radiation ... Planck ... assumed ... that a light source ... emits its
radiation in equal and finite quantities - in quanta. The success of Planck's ideas has been
accompanied by serious consequences. if light is emitted in quanta, must it not, once
emitted, possess a corpuscular structure? ... Jeans and Poincar [showed] that if the
motion of the material particles in a source of light took place according to the laws of
classical mechanics, then the correct law of black-body radiation, Planck's law, could not
be obtained.

During an interview in 1963 de Broglie described how, given the above background, his discoveries
came about:-

As in my conversations with my brother we always arrived at the conclusion that in the

case of X-rays one had both waves and corpuscles, thus suddenly - ... it was certain in the
course of summer 1923 - I got the idea that one had to extend this duality to material
particles, especially to electrons. And I realised that, on the one hand, the Hamilton-
Jacobi theory pointed somewhat in that direction, for it can be applied to particles and, in
addition, it represents a geometrical optics; on the other hand, in quantum phenomena one
obtains quantum numbers, which are rarely found in mechanics but occur very frequently

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in wave phenomena and in all problems dealing with wave motion.

The wave nature of the electron was experimentally confirmed in 1927 by C J Davisson, C H Kunsman
and L H Germer in the United States and by G P Thomson (the son of J J Thomson) in Aberdeen,
Scotland. De Broglie's theory of electron matter waves was later used by Schrdinger, Dirac and others
to develop wave mechanics.

After his doctorate, de Broglie remained at the Sorbonne where he taught for two years, becoming
professor of theoretical physics at the Henri Poincar Institute in 1928. From 1932 he was also professor
of theoretical physics at the Facult des Sciences at the Sorbonne. De Broglie taught there until he retired
in 1962. From 1944 he was a member of the Bureau des Longitudes. In 1945 he became an adviser to the
French Atomic Energy Commissariat.

His greatest honour was being awarded the Nobel Prize in 1929. We have quoted above from his lecture
given at the award ceremony. Let us quote further from the lecture (see for example [9]):-

Thus I arrived at the following general idea which has guided my researches: for matter,
just as much as for radiation, in particular light, we must introduce at one and the same
time the corpuscle concept and the wave concept. In other words, in both cases we must
assume the existence of corpuscles accompanied by waves. But corpuscles and waves
cannot be independent, since, according to Bohr, they are complementary to each other;
consequently it must be possible to establish a certain parallelism between the motion of a
corpuscle and the propagation of the wave which is associated with it.

After receiving the Nobel Prize in 1929 De Broglie worked on extensions of wave mechanics. Among
publications on many topics he published work on Dirac's theory of the electron, on the new theory of
light, on Uhlenbeck's theory of spin, and on applications of wave mechanics to nuclear physics. He wrote
at least twenty-five books including Ondes et mouvements (Waves and motions) (1926), La mcanique
ondulatoire (Wave mechanics) (1928), Une tentative d'interprtation causale et non linaire de la
mcanique ondulatoire: la thorie de la double solution (1956), Introduction la nouvelle thorie des
particules de M Jean-Pierre Vigier et de ses collaborateurs (1961), tude critique des bases de
l'interprtation actuelle de la mcanique ondulatoire (1963). The last three mentioned books were
published in English translations as Non-linear Wave Mechanics: A Causal Interpretation (1960),
Introduction to the Vigier Theory of elementary particles (1963), and The Current Interpretation of Wave
Mechanics: A Critical Study (1964).

He wrote many popular works which demonstrate his interest in the philosophical implications of
modern physics, including Matter and Light: The New Physics (1939); The Revolution in Physics (1953);
Physics and Microphysics (1960); and New Perspectives in Physics (1962).

In 1933 de Broglie was elected to the Acadmie des Sciences becoming Permanent Secretary for the
mathematical sciences in 1942. The Acadmie awarded him its Henri Poincar Medal in 1929 and the

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Albert I of Monaco Prize in 1932. Other honours which he received included the Kalinga Prize which
was awarded to him by UNESCO in 1952 for his efforts towards the understanding of modern physics by
the general public. The French National Scientific Research Centre awarded him its gold medal in 1956.
Further honours included the awarding of the Grand Cross of the Lgion d'Honneur and Belgium made
him an Officer of the Order of Leopold. He received honorary doctorates from the Universities of
Warsaw, Bucharest, Athens, Lausanne, Quebec, and Brussels. He was elected to honorary membership
of eighteen academies and learned societies in Europe, India, and the United States.

De Broglie described himself as:-

... having much more the state of mind of a pure theoretician than that of an experimenter
or engineer, loving especially the general and philosophical view ... .

The central question in de Broglie's life was whether the statistical nature of atomic physics reflects an
ignorance of the underlying theory or whether statistics is all that can be known. For most of his life he
believed the former although as a young researcher he had at first believed that the statistics hide our
ignorance. Perhaps surprisingly, he returned to this view late in his life stating that:-

... the statistical theories hide a completely determined and ascertainable reality behind
variables which elude our experimental techniques.

Let us end our biography with the tribute paid to de Broglie by C W Oseen, Chairman of the Nobel
Committee for Physics of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences:-

When quite young you threw yourself into the controversy raging round the most profound
problem in physics. You had the boldness to assert, without the support of any known fact,
that matter had not only a corpuscular nature, but also a wave nature. Experiment came
later and established the correctness of your view. You have covered in fresh glory a name
already crowned for centuries with honour.

Article by: J J O'Connor and E F Robertson

Click on this link to see a list of the Glossary entries for this page

List of References (10 books/articles) A Quotation

Mathematicians born in the same

country

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Broglie

Cross-references to History Topics 1. The quantum age begins

2. Light through the ages: Relativity and quantum
era

Honours awarded to Louis de Broglie

(Click a link below for the full list of mathematicians honoured in this way)
Nobel Prize Awarded 1929
Fellow of the Royal Society Elected 1953
Paris street names Rue de Broglie (13th Arrondissement)

Other Web sites 1. Nobel prizes site (A biography of de Broglie and

his Nobel prize presentation speech)
2. Encyclopaedia Britannica

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JOC/EFR May 2001 School of Mathematics and Statistics

University of St Andrews, Scotland
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